Sun Sentinel: Parkland Officials Ignored 69 Mental Health Warnings

For those who believe we have a gun problem, not a mental health care crisis, there is this little gem from the Sun Sentinel which is fast becoming my new favorite news source:

Cruz didn’t keep his homicidal urges quiet. But the schools incompetently handled the threat he represented to his fellow classmates and teachers.

Cruz’s lust for violence had been documented officially 69 times in his life. At least 30 people knew of his troubling behavior before the shooting.

Experts say threat assessments — recognizing troubling signs, assessing the student and acting on the risk — are one of the most effective ways to shut down potential shootings.

At Stoneman Douglas High, Principal Ty Thompson was not involved in threat assessments. Assistant Principal Jeff Morford performed his first one ever on Cruz, couldn’t remember any details, and ignored warnings about the potential danger of Cruz, the MSD Commission found.

I think it’s a must read for all pro 2A people. Don’t rely on that corporate news you hate so much to tell you what’s within the report. Informing yourself about this shooting is one of the best ways for you to defend the 2nd Amendment.

You should spread the report around because practically no one knows it’s out there. I already had it for days. The anti gun people don’t want you to read it.

I have read almost the entire report. I agree everyone should read it.

Can people help me with one thing? I have been searching the draft report for references to arming teachers, or more specifically, allowing teachers to participate in the Guardian Program. I cannot find any reference to this recommendation.

It has been reported that the commission members voted 13-1 to include the recommendation but I cannot find it at all in the report.

This kid straight up said multiple times he was going to shoot up the school. He told people to their face he would shoot them. He pointed a gun at his mother and said he was going to kill her. He had the police called on him for threatening to harm people when he got angry. He killed animals and disrespected their remains. He took a dead animal to school to gross people out. He got into the alt right, MAGA, Hitler and the KKK. He liked pissing people off with his MAGA hat and saying hateful things about Jews, blacks and homosexuals. He started putting swastikas all over his stuff, he even put them on the magazines for the school shooting. He worshiped the Columbine and Virginia Tech shooters. He listened to “Pump up kicks” often, which is about shooting kids. He posted on the internet about how he was going to shoot up the school. He made videos on his cellphone about his ideas for the shooting. He spent his time researching how to commit a mass shooting and what kind of response law enforcement has. He was taking pictures of himself in his gear for the attack like the Virginia Tech shooter. He was in his yard practicing and he joined ROTC. He looked up why the AR-15 is the chosen gun for school shootings and planned to get his mother to buy him guns if he behaved. He was getting mental treatment most of his life until he immediately stopped when he turned 18 and his adopted mother was not alive anymore to get him to go.

Just to name a few things he did. There is more, including other students warning specifically about his behaviors, his intentions and why they think he is a school shooter planning an attack. People even told the FBI and police.

The kid was so desensitized he went to get a drink after he ran from the school. While at a fast food place he sat down to talk to another kid. The boy he was hanging out with was the brother of a kid he just shot. After hanging out, he went for a walk until police caught him. Then he freaked out and threw up his drink.

Security theater is right… anyone else hear the radio commercials before school started this year insisting that threatening your school was a federal offense and the FBI *would* follow up on it yadda yadda…

This country made a decision back in the early 1980s that it was okay for the mentally ill to urinate and defecate in public. And if the mentally ill chose to eat their own feces that was okay as well. The city of New York could not forcibly Medicate a person doing such things.

Another victory for the ACLU and the new Mental Health Care system.

So instead of holding people accountable for their actions including the mentally ill now we have people who are normal, having their guns confiscated by a government who is afraid of “the mentally ill”.

The “new” definition of the mentally ill being defined by the government.

Yep, thanks to President Reagan for filling our streets with the mentally ill. And thanks to the Republicans who consistently cut community mental health funding available through Obama care.

“What Reagan is not readily known for is the long term effect of a law he repealed that essentially deinstitutionalized mentally ill patients at the federal level (Roberts, 2013). While some of his fiscal policies had a positive effect on the U.S. economy during the 1980s, his decision to deinstitutionalize mentally ill patients had a much more deleterious effect on these patients, their communities, and the agencies that were left to contend with these individuals’ mental health issues (Honberg, 2015).”

The mentally ill were deinstitutionalized in 1980, Kennedy was assassinated in 19 63, 17 years before. In fact, the Democrats had been supporting community mental health clinics for years, but this all came to an end when Reagan assume the office.

“The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 (MHSA) was United States legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter which provided grants to community mental health centers. During the following Ronald Reagan administration, the United States Congress repealed most of the law.[1] The MHSA was considered landmark legislation in mental health care policy.”

The hidden reason the Republicans wanted to feel the streets with the mentally ill was in order to create a wave of petty crimes that would justify the Republicans police state and repressive policies. Just like trump, the Republicans motivate people with fear, “ only I can protect you from those bad hombres”.

It is wrong to hold Kennedy responsible, the purpose of the bill was to support community mental health centers. Kennedy was assassinated just a few months after he signed a bill and the Republicans subverted the act in order to deinstitutionalize thousands of the mentally ill.

The Democrats tried again to support mental health centers in 1980 but their efforts were once again corrupted by the Republicans, Reagan in particular.

“Mental Retardation and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963) was an act to provide federal funding for community mental health centers and research facilities in the United States. This legislation was passed as part of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier.[1] It led to considerable deinstitutionalization.”

The denial of facts is a hallmark of the emotionally driven Liberal. Besides President Kennedy it was Jerry Brown Sr., former Gov of California. He was before Ronald Reagan. Brown was the one who started releasing the mentally ill on to the streets of California.

The USSR put political dissidents in “mental health hospitals”(prisons). Political dissidents were anyone who might have stated they did not like having to walk a couple of extra miles to buy bread, because the closer bakery was for party members only. People that had a ground floor flat had neighbors that would tell lies about them, hoping to get that flat.
We really don’t want to go there.

We PotG are naturally resistant to government, or any other social institution, entering our private space to observe our behavior and question our sanity. Who is to say that an old woman can’t have more than X cats in her home? Or, an outlandish electric bill and grow-lights visible through the windows? Got that.

Conversely, when behavior occurs outside one’s own private space then knowledge of that behavior enters the public domain. What is my privacy claim “. . . to urinate and defecate in public”?

We really ought to explore the cases of mass-killers and that of killers with less ambition and tabulate the information known (or knowable) to the authorities before the heinous incident.

There are two theories to compare. One is that a heinous criminal “just snapped” with no history distinguishable from the mainstream. The other is that most (not necessarily all) heinous criminals have a history distinguishable from that of the mainstream.

An examination of the cases and available data ought to reveal which theory has more explanatory value.

The school system ought to be able to identify troubled youths and provide them help in time to save them (as best as might be possible). Law enforcement ought to be able to identify older youths and adults to present them to judges who will provide the appropriate custodial care to minimize the damage they impose on society.

If these institutions (schools and law-enforcement) won’t perform these functions then we might as well acknowledge that we live – relatively speaking – in a dog-eat-dog world where it’s every [wo]man for himself.

This is to say that schools and law enforcement will provide so much structure and constraint upon the public as politicians deem sufficient to their purposes. Generally, that will be preserving social institutions such as schools and government. That they provide more must be seen as incomplete, imperfect, and satisfactory to the consumer (voter) at his own judgement.

Certainly, many will be entirely satisfied. They go about their lives taking limited precautions (e.g., locking their doors) but they don’t see any need for self-defense or any change in public policy.

But what of those who intend to take care to provide for their own defense? What of those who are more afraid of the self-defenders than the criminals and crazies? Whose will should prevail here?

We still have to realize who started it by releasing the mentally ill from the state hospitals. We had them thrust upon us by Reagan in Ca, releasing many who were in state care from childhood. While there were abuses – troublesome family members kept hidden away by the state – state hospitals were the last hope for many and are needed today. Many of the homeless would take their meds from out patient sites if it were made clear that they would be admitted and kept in patient. This would be much safer for society and make our communities safer for our families.

These days, even if a family and a community KNOWS they have a severely troubled kid, there’s almost nothing they can do. There isn’t anywhere they can send them. I was talking to a SWAT officer yesterday about violent kids he’s seen in his time as an officer. Even if a kid is showing obvious signs – killing animals, setting fires, etc. – there is almost nothing the family can do because there is nowhere for the kid to go, assessments cost thousands of dollars that most families can’t afford, and as long as the kid is smart enough to stay *just* out of the going to jail zone, everyone else is helpless.

I mean, I sure as hell understand not wanting to pay for things as I’m pretty fiscally conservative myself. But there are people you can’t fix. There are people who are just going to be a clear and present danger to society and refusing to address this in a meaningful way simply exposes the rest of us to danger that could have been prevented.

The same was true of Devin Kelley, the guy who shot up Sutherland Springs. He grew up not too far south of here and I know people who knew him as a teenager. He had a long history of violence and threatening, stalking, and beating up girlfriends. That was way before he went into the military. I think everyone just put their heads down and hoped the military would ‘shape him up.’ Not so much.

“There are people who are just going to be a clear and present danger to society and refusing to address this in a meaningful way . .”

The kid and his buddy were apprehended while they were torturing someone’s pat cat. Kid #1 was pretty articulate, had obviously been reading the Dexter novels, and claimed that he was studying “blood splatters”. Knowing not much was going to happen to them, they obviously enjoyed the media attention. They thought the whole thing was pretty funny. In actuality, since they were both juveniles, nothing much did happened to them. They’re still out there . . .

So, Elaine, I hope you won’t think I’m picking on you but, since you brought it up, I’ll get to the point: Your above comment is obviously well intended but, since you work in a mental health field, I’d like to ask you to elaborate on just what “in a meaningful way” actually means? The incident I described actually happened about 10 years ago. The teen cat butchers were busted, charged with animal cruelty, and released to their parents. They may or may not have gotten some kind of probation. In my estimation, these guys were definitely a “clear and present” danger. But they were also teenagers and, even more important, they were citizens in a free and liberal society. I’d appreciate knowing how we should deal with people like this?

The Left makes this mistake: Everyone is a wounded rabbit who just needs love and help. We can fix all of this with touchy feels mental health. Wrong.

The Right makes this mistake: All these kids need is a good boot up their ass and to get a good job and learn how to be a proper man and pull up by their bootstraps. Also wrong.

There are already instruments in place that are used to assess the presence or absence of empathy, which is the key component here. People who lack empathy are much more prone to harming others in various ways because there’s simply nothing to keep them from doing it. Lacking empathy and/or a conscience is not a mental illness per se; the non empathetic person can function quite well in society and exploit others with ease if they’re smart enough and socially skilled enough to do so.

Take Eric Harris, who the FBI designated a psychopath after 10 years. Eric Harris was actually a fairly popular kid who dated girls a lot older than he was and wasn’t particularly bullied. He repeatedly demonstrated a lack of empathy for the victims of the petty crimes he committed in the years before Columbine. He had gotten in trouble a number of times and was always able to sweet talk his way out of it. It’s not hard to manipulate others when you don’t feel any guilt or remorse about doing so and regard taking from or hurting others as your natural right in a sucker’s game.

What I wonder about is this: maybe a kid can have one or two incidents, but by the third one, an assessment process should be somewhere in the picture to determine whether the kid possesses a functional amount of empathy toward others. If there’s any treatment the lack of such (I recently heard about a center that apparently specializes in such but haven’t looked it up) the sooner that treatment begins, the better it’s going to work because of how brain development works. You only have a certain window for these things and it’s mostly in youth. Miss that window and you’re unlikely to effect lasting change.

There are low empathy people who never hurt or feel the desire to hurt animals or people. Those people are generally not going to do things that will earn them a criminal dossier. If a young person is already showing a pattern of remorselessness in both behavior and upon interview by LEO, another process probably needs to be involved at that point. It could be that the kid has an untreated mental illness. Again, catching it early is best.

I’m remembering the essay “I am Adam Lanza’s mother,” written after the Sandy Hook shooting by the mother of a 13 year old boy. I believe they finally discovered that he had bipolar disorder and got him appropriate treatment. Timely intervention is the whole deal.

@Elaine: Cogent reply. If the answers were obvious we would have discovered them long ago. We haven’t.

I agree that there is a window of opportunity that closes somewhere. It may open again in the 30’s or 40’s.

Now, where is that window? Is it in months 1 – 12? 24 – 60? Later? Not my background so I have no opinion worth expressing. But, experts in early childhood development seem to agree that it’s pretty early in life – maybe the first few years.

And, empathy is an issue offering some explanatory value. The book Better Angles of our Nature points this out. Perhaps our Education-Union-Complex needs to see to it that empathy-promoting literature is read in neighborhood libraries and targeted homes.

We’ve discussed what topics are inside/outside the “lanes” of various professionals. I think we PotG need to call upon early childhood development experts to weigh-in on what factor’s presence/absence might correlate with and explain the cradle-to-school-to-prison pipeline.

A big question the voters have to ask themselves is whether public and private resources ought to be pumped-in vigorously to: early childhood development in inner-city neighborhoods; or, gun-control. Which to the experts think would pay the greater dividends? Can they explain their rationale?

A friend of mine also did a piece about how the engineering of both social media and video games is contributing (in his opinion) to the rise of narcissism in kids. It’s a bit technical but a good read.

@Elaine: Ok, bought the book; so it’s on my reading list. Started reading the interview.

You may be interested in the work of Dave Grossman. He has written a number of books claiming that violent video games are doing terrible damage to young minds. He says these games are what the military uses on recruits to overcome their natural humanity’s resistance to killing fellow members of the species.

I’m very skeptical about just about every proposition. Including Grossman’s, no matter how persuasively he makes his arguments. But Grossman presents me with a great dilemma. His two seminal works are On Combat and On War. His prior job was teaching psychology at West Point and working for the Army on teaching recruits how to overcome their natural humanity’s resistance to killing. So, I have two ugly choices.

First, I can accept what he says about video games and youth; which I would rather not do.
Second, I can accept the possibility that he has hoodwinked the Department of Defense into thinking that he was successful in doing his job for the Army. I’d rather not think that is so either. I don’t see a practical way out of this dilemma.

Nevertheless, for our society to survive, we must resolve this dilemma. We have to figure out how to stop teaching our youth how to kill fellow members of OUR society while at the same time teaching this same sub-set of our culture to kill members of our ENEMIES’ societies. Unfortunately, Grossman seems to have the appropriate body of knowledge to achieve these goals simultaneously.

Meanwhile, back in the real world. Our society is pretty indifferent as to taking the toys away from young men while – at the same time – taking the toys away from their fathers and grandfathers.

The SCOTUS decision baring California from regulating the sale of violent video games to those under 18 seems – to me – to be the wrong idea. As much as I support the 1A equally with the 2A, I think legislatures have the power to withhold some rights from youth. If they can’t, well then parents must pick up their end of the responsibility. Yet, this is wishful thinking.

So, plenty of parents will fail in rearing up cohorts of responsible young men. And that leaves to the rest of us the necessity of dealing with the feral product of their neglect. Government will do only so much as is necessary to protect its own institutions (its 3 branches of government, schools and so forth.) So, you and I will have to confront those not yet (or no longer) incarcerated with the means of an effective self-defense.

What’s interesting to me about Ramin’s work is that he is not talking specifically about violent video games. He’s talking about social media, a lot, and how game companies are using neuroscience to engineer kids into both spending money and also being addicted to overstimulation in ANY kind of video game.

I notice over and over how a lot (not all) of the mass shooters put a lot of their violent intention on social media. It seems that part of the drive is being seen in that way. It’s perhaps the same as the serial killers who like to boast about their crimes after they’ve been incarcerated with no hope of release. Narcissism is a huge and underestimated problem, and it’s something Christopher Lasch pointed at back in 1979.

“What I wonder about is this: maybe a kid can have one or two incidents, but by the third one, an assessment process should be somewhere in the picture to determine whether the kid possesses a functional amount of empathy toward others. . . ”

This is a good jumping off point. In most municipalities killing and/or torturing animals is classed as “animal cruelty” and is considered a low impact crime. You’ll get probation or a few months for it. The two guys I wrote about didn’t even get that because they were juvies, “just kids”. Nonetheless, they are just the kinds of people that make going around armed and wary a damned good idea. The most valuable lesson they got from their cat-killing arrest was that they needed to be more careful, more discrete next time. Lesson learned.

But let’s say there’s an assessment process put in place, a active fairly long-term probation period put in place where they receive required therapy and required evaluations. But then what? When we start talking about “doing something” about low empathy individuals we’re really talking about an administrative process that stigmatizes individuals, labels them deviants, turns them into second-class citizens by denying them the constitutional rights that non-stigmatized citizens enjoy.

The practical reality of “assessing” low empathy individuals is that the next step implies a level of governmental intervention into the lives of free citizens that may be so outside the American experience that we have to become a less free society. We have the technology to do some incredibly invasive things to people we define as deviants, who my end up being monitored by an increasingly authoritarian government—acting, of course, in the interests of “common good”.

Psychological assessments performed by governmental bodies are never benign and seldom remain limited to small populations. While we may agree that people who hurt animals and are somewhere on the autism scale out to be watched, there are already plenty of people working very hard to convince our administrative state that everyone who visits the local gun-range are psychologically unfit to be treated as free American citizens. In their liberal-progressive minds we’re the same as the cat-butchers

Thing is though – most low empathy or autism spectrum people aren’t ever going to do anything that would land them on the radar of the police. When we’re talking about someone who keeps showing up on that radar, over and over, for the same kinds of problems, that person is already demonstrating a lack of regard as a pattern, not just a one-off caused by stupidity or immaturity. It’s the repetition of those events that would trigger an assessment process at some point.

Everyone makes mistakes. But there’s a real question about at what point a person is unable to learn, unwilling to learn, or just doesn’t care. Sorry if I didn’t make it clear that what I’m talking about is people who have already shown up on law enforcement radar multiple times.

Elaine D
When anyone brings up the columbine murderers, I like to remind them and everyone else, that it was a pretty blond adult white woman, who knowingly did illegally purchased the guns and gave them to the two teenage children, who latter killed so many innocent kids. This pretty adult white woman was NEVER PROSECUTED for supplying 3 of the 4 illegal guns.

I don’t often find myself agreeing with you Elaine, but allow me to make the most of this opportunity:

I agree 100% there is no where for…really anyone to turn with the type of very troubled youth you’re talking about. Families can only do so much, and there is very little support for them, but even school personel, school systems, LE, juvenile courts and the pediatric and adolescent mental health establishment have little in the way of resources.
I’ve seen good families, with multiple happy, health children dragged nearly to destruction, and beyond at times, by a troubled child. Reaching out to counselors, schools, LE and doctors with no relief from their willfully destructive and violent, defiant, oppositional child.

As I posted in response to an article here regarding the recent 14 year old would be school shooter, in too many cases a family can beg for help and try to be part of the solution, can alert schools, who already know the child is out of control and a hazard, can alert LE, who can do basically nothing until serious crimes are committed, and sometimes little then, and no matter where they turn the child stays in the home and in the school…in the community until they finally really hurt someone or burn something down and go to prison, or age out of the home and school, and become homeless.

There simply aren’t facilities in most locations for dealing with defiant troubled youth. It’s always seen as the parents problem (though siblings also often suffer terribly) and even when schools and cops know the child is beyond parental control, there is simply no where to put them, no treatment available, and generally no recourse unless/until the child enters the juvenile justice system in a major way.

The thing is, even juvenile detention, or adult jail only warehouses them, often making the person worse off, until they are released…and recorded.

I’m a fiscal conservative and a social libertarian, but I can see that spending money on facilities and programs to assist families with such children, and ultimately to take custodial care of some such children is money well spent. It saves families, children, schools, other students and society at large much more than would be so spent, and it’s the only sensible thing to do, let alone being the only compassionate thing to do.

I also want to say that in so many cases the family is right there begging the school, the cops, the counselors and the judges to do something for/about their troubled child, and nothing is done. It’s a real conundrum, and one that plays out, to everyone’s detriment, in community after community without end.

@Ardent & Elaine: “I’m a fiscal conservative and a social libertarian, but I can see that spending money on facilities and programs to assist families with such children, and ultimately to take custodial care of some such children is money well spent. ”

I had the impression that TTAG was a forum for PotG to piss and moan about how .gov should leave our guns alone and also leave every individual to his own devices to “be all that he can be”. I didn’t know that there was anyone here (possibly Elaine as an exception) who thought there might be a public safety aspect of government’s role. I’m shocked to see a second person who thinks this might be the case.

I am a pragmatist first and a conservative/libertarian second. We might not be able to bring society to conclude it best to hang the guilty and let the failures to starve to death. As long as that’s the case, we need to make the best of the society that is within it’s limited ability to reform itself.

We have 2/3’rds of gun-deaths that are suicides and 1/3’rd that are homicides. Most of the non-fatal gunshot wounds are criminal. These three seem to be in the lane of mental-health and that seems to be a public hygiene issue.

Purely from a perspective of defending the 2A – with absolutely no concern for the welfare of anyone in society – perhaps we PotG ought to consider a campaign for the .gov and the .ngo’s to focus attention on the root causes of mental illness. suicide<-mental-illness<-depression. crime<-mental-illness<-childhood-development.

Bullets, gunpowder, primers, firing-pins, triggers do not cause someone to commit suicide; whether by gunshot or over-dose. Nor do they cause a young child to pursue a live of violence. There is something else; perhaps in the environment or in the nursery. What is this root cause? What are the root causes? We PotG don't claim expertise in this area. Who makes such a claim?

What do you folks (Elaine, help me out here. What are the names of the professions that are pertinent here?) who claim expertise think? We PotG will listen respectfully. At least Ardent, Elaine & Mark will. One factor might be (actually have been) lead in the environment that affected the brains of developing children. Who would have thought such a thing to be a factor? But it was! What is it now?

I hasten to add that we expect a plausible theory. It is not enough to say that taxes are not high enough. Nor that there is an insufficient penetration of public schools in the marketplace for elementary education. Nor that there are insufficient illegal aliens, nor that it's all Trump's fault.

We PotG expect you'All to show repeatable scientifically refutable studies that correlate with the sub-populations that have high vs low rates of suicide/depression or alcohol/drug-abuse or criminal behavior. Which interventions have shown efficacy and economy in reducing morbidity/mortality?

Are there any Constitutional or legal impediments to implementing any such interventions? Do you'All think that any such interventions would be cost-effective to implement relative to whatever it is you think you might accomplish by way of gun-control?

If you have better interventions than gun-control then perhaps we PotG could get on-board and support your bids for public funds to pursue these.

There is a major difference between homeless druggies and kids who want to murder a lot of other kids. The homeless “crazies” are not the issue when it comes to mass shootings. You can crowd the mental facilities with those homeless and not stop the gun free zone shootings.

With mass shooters, we are talking about culture/society and parenting. When you fail at making a healthy environment the kids start to go “crazy” and the boys get violent. Then parents drug them up for not behaving. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, kids end up snapping.

With the internet kids can go online to get ideas of how to make people suffer. The Columbine kids were smart enough to successfully immortalize their concept of revenge for other kids to reference. The ideas are out there, you can’t take them back or hide your kids from them.

You can’t stuff every kid in a mental facility, especially when they aren’t truly crazy, they’re just angry and frustrated. They will tell you they are not the problem, the problem is you — that tends to be the truth. You are the ones driving them “crazy.” You are the ones tormenting them. You are the ones drugging them up for not being your perfect notion of a child. You are the crazy ones… You are the bad people… You created them.

Some kids are messed up. You know that when they are very little. Way before they can hurt a human. They like to start off hurting animals. The serial killer types… Those of the people you can’t help with parenting and a better culture. You can ban them from buying guns, but that won’t stop them from killing. You can’t put them in prison until they commit a crime. Do you let them roam around until they murder? In a society without guns, these types of people thrive.

For some reason your post is making me think of a Dr. Phil (I know – I never watch TV, but I was in the room when a friend was watching it) epsiode that was about a woman who “catfished” for years using the identities of other people.

What struck me was how, every time he asked her how she thought her actions made her victims – who were sitting on stage with her – feel, she would start to cry, and act upset, and say things like, “I can’t imagine how they must feel.”

At the end he told them, “She’s telling you the truth. She really doesn’t have any idea how you feel.” Essentially, he told them – and her – that she was a sociopath. Someone who is unable to even contemplate how others are affected by her actions.

So maybe that’s the kind of conscienceless person who never necessarily buys a gun. Still, they harm others. They are driven by what they want more than any consideration of how their behavior affects others.

I think about Larry Nassar, the pedophile doctor. In front of the cameras and the courts, he cries and says he knows he did terrible things. In private, he complains that the charges are too harsh, that the 332 girls we know about that he victimized are being too hard on poor Larry and really it was just medical malpractice and not a crime.

I think of the infamous Lance Armstrong interview where he bawls and goes on about how much it’s hurt HIM to come out with confessions of doping and have his career ruined. He isn’t that concerned about all the people who placed faith, trust, and many dollars into supporting him who he betrayed.

@Elaine: Despite the criticism (s**t) you get here, I’m convinced you really “get it”. Society’s institutions can go only so far in protecting us from one-another. The “Leviathan” brought the homicide rate down from the thousands/100k/year to hundreds/100k/year. A huge accomplishment. However, I remain unconvinced that it reduced the homicide rate to 10’s/100k/year which we enjoy today. Something else accounts for that.

I’m unconvinced that civilized societies have put their finger on the solution to reducing the homicide rate from 10’s/100k/year to single digits.

You can find a few isolated societies that have accomplished this. Let’s suppose Iceland. Europe seems to have done this up until the wave of immigration from southern and eastern continents. There is a mix of sub-sectors of large societies that have their homicide rates in the single digits while living within the same borders with other sub-sectors whose homicide rates are still double-digits.

Meanwhile, all our (US) society is concentrating on is the war on guns and other political and economic issues. Our social investment might be better spent on figuring out how to make our double-digit homicide sub-sectors more like our single-digits sub-sectors.

After all, if it’s possible to remake our society into something like that of Japan it’s also possible for us to remake it into something like that of Switzerland.

Part of that is living in such a big society. One intensely focused on the dominance of individualism. Which is what Lasch was talking about.

There’s not much violent crime in Vietnam, even in the big cities. Vietnamese culture is very big on respect for others and polite behavior. It’s a pretty amazing experience to walk around in a city of 8 million and never see or hear a woman getting catcalled or approached aggressively. In the three times I’ve been so far, I saw a man speak aggressively to a woman one time. He was obviously drunk and everyone around him IMMEDIATELY stepped forward and reproached him for his behavior and were obviously ready to do something to stop him if he escalated. He quickly backed down and grumbled his way away with everyone staring at him.

What do we do here? We literally pull out our damn cellphones and video a crime happening right in front of us. Who steps in to help? Why do so many people in this country stick their heads in the sand? Are we so “you do you” that “doing you” gets to include any type of reprehensible behavior?

Byrd noted that Jarrett started exhibiting mental health problems at the age of 5, and that his situation may have been made worse by ongoing drug abuse.

This is a crazy guy who hasn’t been put into a facility to make sure he doesn’t go around killing people. He doesn’t need a gun. No one can stop him unless they have a gun. Everyone stands there watching helplessly with their phones out because that’s all they can do. Now he will be going to jail, but he will get out eventually. This is the type of person that needs to be banned from owning guns and put into a mental facility to monitor him.

BFD. So now you ban him from owning guns. But, maybe, let us suppose, he does agree with the anti-gunners and is anti gun himself, so that is why he uses a knife.
So, by issuing an “Extreme Risk Protection Orders” (ERPO), “Risk Protection Orders” (Florida), “Gun Violence Restraining Orders,” “risk warrants” or “Proceedings for the Seizure and Retention of a Firearm” one has accomplished absolutely nothing in keeping this person from being a real threat to others since although his rights to a firearm are restricted by these measures, but he could not give a hoot about firearms and carries a knife (insert anything else here).

I think we’re being just a little bit naiive calling this incompetence.

When you systematically put into place an arrangement where dangerous individuals are not held accountable for even criminal activity, but are held in close proximity with others who you’ve simultaneously made defenseless against violent acts by said dangerous individuals, and your own political power/benefit is derived from blaming said violent acts on your opposition…that’s what we call means, motive, and opportunity.

There is no other possible conclusion that could be reached other than what was witnessed in Parkland. And while Parkland is ground zero for the Civil Disarmament Party, one of its favorite loyal strongholds, that place is hardly the only time bomb wired by leftists currently ticking away, waiting for the right moment to pop and be used against those of us who would see such evil defended against.

The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 (MHSA) was United States legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter which provided grants to community mental health centers. During the following Ronald Reagan administration, the United States Congress repealed most of the law.[1] The MHSA was considered landmark legislation in mental health care policy.

The system is broke, laziness or incompetent. … My cousin, severe mental issues, no gunz, his sister calls mental health, they do nothing, two weeks later he kills roommate with machete. …. Why didn’t “they” step in? Because his sister said he had no guns.

So, these are the same folks who should be “flagging” who can’t get a gun?

More authoritah! For folks like the ones in Parkland who did such a stellar job. 30 times? 50 times? They can’t even agree on a count. Who all? The cops? The school district? The Justice system? The “resources” stationed on site? They can’t even agree on who was supposed to be involved, doing what.

Sherif Lyin can agree that he doesn’t care what sheeple — er, we’d call them citizens. He called them “sheep.” — think. And he can hold a WEE smackdown on CNN. Meanwhile, Little Hoagie advocated his way into Harvard, with an SAT verbal of 3-400, based on his public rantings.

In balance we keep hearing about the LEOs from another jurisdition that went in once they arrived; the coach out in a field who got his ass into position; the kids who helped each other out, hiding, squirting away, barricades …

They didn’t fire Andrew Medina for sexually harassing girls before the shooting. They didn’t fire him after he got kids killed. He was transfered to another location — the same tactic the Catholic church uses for their “priests.”

A discipline committee wanted to fire Marjory Stoneman Douglas coach Andrew Medina last year for sexually harassing two students. But someone overruled them.

Instead, Medina was suspended just three days from his duties as a security monitor – a job he was working months later when he spotted Nikolas Cruz walking onto campus. Medina failed to stop Cruz, and the gunman soon killed 17 staff and students and wounded 17 more.

Among the dead was Meadow Pollack, one of the students Medina, 39, was accused of harassing in February 2017.

According to records obtained by the South Florida SunSentinel, Medina, who is also an assistant baseball coach, asked one girl to go on a date and another said he made lewd comments to her and said he wanted to visit her at work. Broward County Schools investigators say one of the students’ stories was corroborated by surveillance video of Medina approaching her in a hallway on Feb. 16, 2017.

According to Andrew and Hunter Pollack, Meadow was one of the girls. They said Medina would call Meadow, then 17, “beautiful and sweetheart,” making her uncomfortable. They say that when her boyfriend confronted Medina, Medina threatened him. Meadow and her mother then reported Medina, they said.

Hunter Pollack said the other girl told him Medina made comments about her body and invited her over to his house for drinks.

“If I knew at the time, he would have been fired right away,” Hunter Pollack told CBS Miami. “It’s very unacceptable that the school board allowed this pervert to say stuff to my sister and other girls.”

Yet the students and teachers protest the staff’s reassignments to other locations. They weren’t fired, just relocated. These people still refuse to arm qualified staff and do what security experts tell them to do. Instead they call for repealing the 2nd Amendment and are running a distraction campaign to keep people from reading the commission report by making a big deal about Louis C.K.’s “leaked” comedy routine mentioning Parkland students.

2nd Amendment supporters are too busy complaining about Patreon funds and the so called libtards to counter the current narrative. They are spending time on protecting the 4D chess of the NRA and Trump while the Parkland shooting is still being used to pass gun control and disinform Americans. Right now they care more about “red flag” laws because such laws would personally affect them directly if passed.

And people still wonder why the NRA and their supporters are a bunch of losers.

This happens ALL the time in schools. The kids tell you. They tell you who the creeper teachers are. They know. Everyone knows. And yeah, they just move them from school to school instead of disciplining or firing them.

I hope that if some kind of arming teachers program goes forward, there’s some kind of rigorous mechanism in place to screen out the Larry Nassars that work in schools. They’re not uncommon at all. Unfortunately.

The following might interest some here. Most likely, NONE of the responsible officials, members of Officialdom, aka in some quarters Officialdumb will ever be called to task for their bungling, bungling that led to significant loss of life.